ABSTRACT
The main aim of this chapter is to chart the life and death of the Beautiful Soul in Hegel’s philosophy and its significance for his account of modern institutions such as law. A secondary aim is to indicate, albeit briefly, what the broader significance of Hegel’s shifting accounts might be for law and critical legal method. My starting point, drawing on my previous work, is the claim that law is persistently antinomial in its forms. Legal concepts generally hunt in pairs, in the sense that law is essentially dichotomous. It consists of a series of antinomies. There are, first, antinomies which establish law itself: the ‘ideal’ and the ‘actual’, the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’, the ‘positive’ and the ‘moral’, the ‘formal’ and the ‘informal’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘heteronomy’, the ‘legal’ and the ‘popular ’ (see above, Chapters 2-4; Norrie, 1998b). Secondly, there are antinomies which seek to establish the workings of a particular area of law. In criminal justice, for example, these would include the ‘individual’ and the ‘community’ (or the ‘social’), the ‘criminal’ and the ‘victim’, ‘form’ and ‘content’ (or ‘substance’), the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’ (see above, Chapters 4-7; Norrie, 2000). Thirdly, there are specifically legal antinomies, as it were transmitted inwards from those already mentioned. In criminal law, these would include ‘character ’ and ‘capacity’, ‘motive’ and ‘intention’, the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’, the ‘honest’ and the ‘reasonable’, the ‘orthodox subjectivist’ and the ‘morally contextualist’, the ‘direct’ and the ‘indirect’, ‘foresight’ and ‘foreseeability’.5
